red-eared slider ~ 12/25/13 ~ Golden Gate Park

 

red-eared slider

Trachemys scripta elegans

I rarely get pictures of turtles I find, because they're either very shy or inaccessible and surrounded by water.  This one at Stow Lake was very accommodating to my creeping up on it.  Maybe it's used to lots of people, or maybe it was someone's pet?  According to Austin's Turtle Page, "Red-eared Sliders are thought to be far & away the highest volume pet turtle produced world-wide & are often sold to people who believe they get little larger than hatchlings.  Therefore they're probably the most widely & often dumped into the wild (both inside & outside their native range) of any turtle species on earth."  That's too bad.  They're a striking-looking turtle, and like its look-alike western painted turtle (Chrysemys picta bellii), they're introduced into CA.

pond turtle ~ 03/04/10 ~ Carmel Valley

best guess western pond turtle
best guess Actinemys marmorata pallida

Would anyone hazard a guess as to which kind of turtles these are? I take a picture of them almost every time we drive down Carmel Valley Road looking for spring wildflowers.

ps 05/09/10 - I'm still unsure of this ID for several reasons. 1) The pic is fuzzy, and yet not as fuzzy as last year. 2) Audubon's California book states western pond turtles like to bask alone. 3) Linked above is the southern subspecies. There's also a more social-looking northern counterpart A. m. ssp. marmorata, but its range doesn't extend this far south. 3) There are isolated populations of different turtles, so maybe. 4) Other more social pond turtles have been introduced and have established themselves (red-eared slider and western painted turtle). 5) It's quite possible these are one of the introduced pets since there's an insane barbed fence surrounding this pond (even more than before), hence my fuzzy, zoom pics.

turtles

Yep, it's not the best picture, but I'm posting for the sake of continuity since I always take a picture of these turtles on Carmel Valley Road.

turtles